Taking Care With Business: Can Entrepreneurs Solve Social Problems On Atlanta’s West Side?

Keitra Bates, owner of Westview Pizza Cafe, wants to help home chefs in her neighborhood stay afloat.

Sam Whitehead
/ GPB

Every entrepreneur starts by identifying a problem. Keitra Bates, who owns Westview Pizza Cafe southwest of downtown Atlanta, is no different.

“There is a steamroller of new interest in this area,” Bates said. “And they’re like: ‘The houses are beautiful. Look at this empty warehouse, we’re going to turn this into a Whole Foods.’ What does that mean for Miss Crowder?”

Listen

Listening...

/

3:48

Miss Crowder is a home cook and makes sweet potato pies that her husband sells at different spots around the neighborhood. (I’ve had a piece of the pie. It’s quite good.)

Bates worries a changing neighborhood will put cooks like Crowder out of work, but, entrepreneur that she is, Bates thinks she has a way to keep that from happening.

“Our aim with Marddy’s is to basically put the home chefs in a position where the newcomers will encounter them,” Bates said.

Marddy’s, which Bates said is short for “Market Buddies,” would legitimize home chefs like the Crowders by giving them a storefront, a commercial kitchen, and food safety training.

Bates said she opened Westview Pizza Cafe because she had a hard time finding good, healthy food in her neighborhood. Now, she wants to help preserve the neighborhood's food culture.

Credit Sam Whitehead / GPB

Bates explained her idea to me on a recent afternoon at her restaurant on busy Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, where she told me more about the neighborhood’s food culture. She said the area is full of home cooks making money from their goods.

Take Mr. Crowder, for example, who sells his wife’s sweet potato pies:

“He’s not walking up and down the street,” Bates said. “He’s getting out of his car and getting inside all of the little businesses. If you notice, there’s no ‘No Solicitation’ sign up because we welcome that.”

But selling food without a license isn’t legal, and Bates acknowledged the thought of buying a pie from a stranger might seem odd to some people.

Marddy’s would solve those problems. Bates already has an idea of where in nearby Ashview Heights she’d like to open the storefront. If Marddy’s is successful, Bates wants to replicate it in other west side neighborhoods. But first, she needs to get the store up and running, and, to do that, she’ll have some help.

“The Westside Innovation Lab is investing capital, business development, and mentorship to individuals within west side neighborhoods that have ideas on solving social challenges in their own backyard,” said Rohit Malhotra, the founder of CCI, during a recent interview at the group’s offices in Atlanta.

The finalists who will be participating in the Westside Innovation Lab at the Westview Summer Solstice festival.

Credit Sam Whitehead / GPB

The lab, which launched earlier this month, has eight finalists, each with their own idea for a business that solves some kind of social problem. Think of the program like a six-month startup incubator for entrepreneurs who want to make money while making good.

One participant wants to open a neighborhood coffee shop to provide jobs and job training, another wants to use an existing neighborhood barbershop to do the same, yet another wants to provide STEM mentoring to girls in public school.

Henderson wants to launch a program called Gangstas to Growers that would provide agricultural jobs and job skills to at-risk youth.

Listen

Listening...

/

3:21

Learn more about Henderson's Gangstas to Growers program.

(Left) Abiodun Henderson and her son in the Westview Community Garden. (Right) Sean Walton and the shipping container he wants to turn into a mobile youth engagement center.

Credit Sam Whitehead / GPB

Walton wants to start a business selling pallet gardens and create a mobile version of his youth-engagement-focused bicycle co-op.

Listen

Listening...

/

3:12

Learn more about Walton's plans to create a mobile version of WeCycle.

The programs are grassroots, bottom-up, and created by people who live and work in the neighborhoods they want to serve.

“If we actually invested in community ideas on how to improve their own communities with the same risk tolerance we give to any type of other investment, our ROI, our return on that investment would not only be social,” Malhotra said. “The return on that investment would be economic.”

During the course of the program, participants will receive up to $10,000 in seed money to launch their businesses. Malhotra was quick to point out that money isn’t charity.

"The truth is charity is not working. Charity is not built on achieving set outcomes." - Rohit Malhotra

"Philanthropic investing depends on outputs not outcomes,” Malhotra said. “So, what you’re worried about is: do you have the feel-good stories? That is not well aligned with: are we solving the problem?”

Michael Rich is a political science professor at Emory University who studies community development.

“Charity works,” he told me during a recent conversation. “It just depends: works towards what?”

He said charity can provide temporary assistance to neighborhoods but isn’t good at the long-term support needed to turn them around.

Rich said there are also risks to investing in entrepreneurs.

“It’s a big challenge of going from an idea to a small company,” he said. “There are a lot of hurdles along the way, and we need to figure out ways to be more effective in smoothing that pathway so that these small startups can blossom into companies that end up adding jobs to the neighborhood.”

Businesses start and fail all the time, and for social entrepreneurs there’s more on the line than a paycheck: there’s the social impact their businesses provide.

(Left) Keitra Bates slices watermelon for a group of neighborhood children. (Right) Children enjoying that watermelon in a booth at Westview Pizza Cafe.

Credit Sam Whitehead / GPB

For Keitra Bates, there are the futures of her neighborhood’s home chefs.

“If we aren’t consciously trying to preserve that food culture, it’s going to disappear,” she told me back in her restaurant, where she had recently welcomed in a group of neighborhood kids for a snack and a break from the summer heat.

And for Bates, that all comes back to Miss Crowder’s sweet potato pies.

“It absolutely is a cultural treasure to have this, and the thought of us not having access to that anymore,” she said. “Let’s just say, I don’t want to think of a world without a sweet potato pie like that.”

Related Content

The Obama Administration has added five westside Atlanta neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and unemployment to its Promise Zone Communities program aimed at boosting economic opportunity.

Ashview Heights, the Atlanta University Center, Castleberry Hill, English Avenue and Vine City, have been combined into what the Department of Housing and Urban Development calls the Westside Promise Zone.

On weekday afternoons, vehicle and pedestrian traffic flow heavily through the intersection of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive and Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard about two miles west of downtown Atlanta.

On one corner there is a row of the kind of businesses you’d expect to find: a sports bar, a barber shop, a place to get your taxes done. But one storefront is different, and on certain afternoons, you’ll find Darren Hicks on the sidewalk out front in a full suit handing out fliers.

A little bit of country in the city: that's how Vine City resident Alicia Anderson describes her neighborhood on Atlanta's west side.

Vine City, like English Avenue just to the north, has its fair share of green space, though it's not all intentional: empty lots dot the landscape and give parts of the neighborhood's interior a provincial feel.